Arizona Illustrated

Archaeologists have recently uncovered ancient human footprints beneath the windswept landscape of White Sands National Park in New Mexico that date to as far back as 23,000 years. That makes these footprints the earliest unequivocal evidence for human habitation in the Americas, pushing back our understanding of the date of arrival by as much as 10,000 years. The history-shaking find also helps to validate Native American claims of a deep time connection to this continent, and could forever alter our theories about the peopling of the Americas. Nestled a few paces from the U.S.-Mexico border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Quitobaquito Springs are a rare freshwater source in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. Long before the site was National Park Service land, it was a homestead to the Hia C-ed O’ odham, a tribe not recognized by the U.S. government that doesn’t have federally protected lands. In 2020, construction crews building the Trump administration’s 30-foot steel border wall began closing in on the site, and tribal communities across Arizona mounted a months-long fight to stop it. For O’odham poet and activist Amber Ortega, being part of that fight meant following breadcrumbs left behind by her father and forging a path of her own. University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at Steward Observatory leads the world in making large, lightweight mirrors for the next generation of giant optical telescopes. Currently, they are in the process of fabricating seven massive 8.4 meter mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which promises to revolutionize our views of the cosmos with optics 10 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.